Subject: Re: Could CDR-coding be on the way back?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: 18 Dec 2000 17:36:12 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.arch
Message-ID: <3186149772121174@naggum.net>
* Peter da Silva
| Outside of Usenet, I don't think I've seen mention of Lisp in years.
I have no reason to doubt that this is true for you, but this also means
that both your ability and mine to judge the growth or death cramps of
languages that have particular groups of followers is very limited. How
do you know that Lisp is in the decline? The Common Lisp vendors are
reporting more users. Various Common Lisp implementations have made it
into Linux distributions and are quite popular. Where I work, Perl is
generally acknowledge to lead to management disasters, largely because of
one guy who quit and left us with more than 100,000 lines of utter crap
that it has taken month to decode and re-engineer and sometimes we can't
even figure out how it could possibly have solved anything at all, so
Perl has a real bad rap. The Common Lisp-based application has been
running for almost a year (325 days today), surviving upgrades and lots
of changes and patches, responding to ever changing needs, and the
interest in Common Lisp is growing. Friends and former colleagues make
up a pretty stron growth rate for Common Lisp in Oslo, Norway, and many
other parts of Norway are experiencing rapid increasing growth. This is
of course a "local" phenomenon, but it's all I _really_ know about, so
when you haven't seen mention of Lisp in years, that's just as true, but
it is not enough to conclude that Lisp is on the decline -- you're just
in an area where Lisp is not used, and I am.
What are we going to about these differences? I thikn it is sage advice
to stay away from "language X is winning and language Y is losing"
statements simply because the world of language choice is bigger than
anyone can reasonably expect to get a grip on.
#:Erik
--
The United States of America, soon a Bush league world power. Yeee-haw!